Shuttleworth On Mir: "A Fantastic Piece of Engineering"

[Alex Sarmiento]

Explain why you think an Nvidia driver will support both Mir and Wayland. This, I think, is central to the opinion you've taken up; if this were the case, of course, then Wayland and Mir could easily coexist. Not having Canonical's support for Wayland certainly is not helpful, but it does not otherwise harm Wayland. If this is not the case, then Wayland and Mir are in direct competition with each other for driver support, and the introduction of Mir duplicates the expense of developing Linux drivers for Nvidia. They then either bear twice the expense or take sides, which is a death knell for the other (unless AMD picks it up, and then we have a situation where we have GPU-specific distros; not ideal). Furthermore, Nvidia seems more likely to support Wayland, given the Optimus issues that copyleft licensing has caused them. And Intel provided much of the development force behind Wayland, so I hardly see them deciding to put a bunch of resources into developing a driver for Mir.

fear uncertainty and doubt

[ninez]

I love Mark Shuttleworth's statement "A fantastic piece of engineering" in contrast to Daniel Stone's comment on Mir;

Funny that you should heckle Wayland for being unfinished when Mir is a few linked lists and one glDrawArrays() call, nothing more.

...From google+; https://plus.google.com/100409717163...ts/jDq6BAgdpkG (just past halfway down the page/comments).

Hmmm... Who has done more work on the linux graphical stack and is far more knowledgable ~ Mark Shuttlework (or any Mir developer) vs. Daniel Stone (and the rest of the developers experienced in these areas)?

funny stuff. Marketers / snake-oil salesmen vs. experienced developers.

[phoen1x]

People who use whateverBUNTU should not post in this thread. Tired of your retarded nonsense.

[artivision]

That's absolutely non true. An open source software made by one party (ie, a small project) may be at risk of being abused. A big project supported by multiple players is not, because if you fork it, you get to maintain the contributions of all the others (while they do it for you if you contribute to upstream). You actually get more corporate support, as they are less scared of the license.
That's why there are no significant closed source forks of the Apache server or LLVM/Clang.

The best example if probably the the X Window system, which I doubt that it being MIT made Linux more open to corporate abuse, or more subject to proprietary anything.

I'm not saying that the GPL is bad, it certainly isn't. But permissive licenses certainly ain't bad either.

Maybe you mean the LLVM compiler inside closed source graphics drivers, with back-ends that are not compatible with Linux-LLVM and they are hard to export to Gallium-LLVM drivers, wile the optimization libraries are not compatible at all and you will never found them on open source graphics drivers. Anyway if you don't want only GPL, then install Windows again and its the same.

[GreatEmerald]

Simply put, I am yet to see a single reason why Mir should be preferred over Wayland. While there are plenty of reasons the other way round (mature codebase, experienced developers, development transparency, universal acceptability).

As for the license, I recall reading that GPL on the display server could actually be very harmful. For one, if they were to release "libmir" under GPL as well, it would exclude all the proprietary software from using it. So no games could use it directly etc. Though IIRC Mir is dual-licensed under LGPL, so it should be fine in that regard. Still, the license alone, especially given the CLA, is not going to matter a whole lot in this case.

[spstarr]

Listen Ubuntu folks

I don't *want* a closed graphical UI. I say 'closed' because Ubuntu will GLADLY make sure the binary blobs are front and centre, they do NOT care about Open source drivers, not for their tablets, phones etc. As for license MIT is just fine, even if I like the GPL there are cases where it hurts.

The Ubuntu generation don't understand WHY we are angry about Mir and about why Canonical is doing this. I hope this implodes and that Ubuntu gets shut out more and more.

Don't screw up Wayland, stop sabotaging what limited resources the community has with your for-profit mentality to screw others just to make a buck.

I'm sorry but I want to see Canonical fail. You do NOT pressure the community to do it your way, Red Hat controls many things in FLOSS because they gave so much back to the community, trust is built though collaboration, something Canonical doesn't get or understand.

</rant>

[Libreman]

Maybe you mean the LLVM compiler inside closed source graphics drivers, with back-ends that are not compatible with Linux-LLVM and they are hard to export to Gallium-LLVM drivers, wile the optimization libraries are not compatible at all and you will never found them on open source graphics drivers. Anyway if you don't want only GPL, then install Windows again and its the same.

This is what I've been wondering a long time also. I do not get the Linux fanboys that do not see any point in GPL or even dislike GPL and have no issue with proprietary stuff. Why be a Linux fan then? Just switch to Windows or OS X and you can have all the proprietary stuff you want. The philosophy behind GPL made Linux what it is, if you dislike it then kindly use something else, nobody's stopping you

[MartinN]

I love Mark Shuttleworth's statement "A fantastic piece of engineering" in contrast to Daniel Stone's comment on Mir;



...From google+; https://plus.google.com/100409717163...ts/jDq6BAgdpkG (just past halfway down the page/comments).

Hmmm... Who has done more work on the linux graphical stack and is far more knowledgable ~ Mark Shuttlework (or any Mir developer) vs. Daniel Stone (and the rest of the developers experienced in these areas)?

funny stuff. Marketers / snake-oil salesmen vs. experienced developers.

Yeah, but Mark has a magnetic personality and you don't

[ode79]

Shuttleworth's defensive blogposts are on an increasing 'cadence'...

[xeekei]

And you seem to assume a lot of stuff you know nothing about, like what I know and what I don't. I'm perfectly aware of the X11 license, that's why I said I was annoyed by it. And while the CLA in unfortunate, its less bad than so-called "permissive" license which gives anybody and everybody the right to abuse users by taking the freedom which many value (albeit not all, including you it seems) from them by the way of proprietary software.

I value freedom. That is why I will not trust Canonical with (maybe) the second most important component of GNU/Linux on the desktop; the display server. I will though trust the experienced ex-X.org developers whom now work on Wayland. Mir will make everything more complicated for everyone.